Darya Belousova, a speech therapist at the City Psychological and Pedagogical Center, talks about how to help a child prepare a retelling and keep his nerves at the same time.
You must agree that it is not an easy task to prepare a retelling with a child and not to quarrel to smithereens. It seems to us that he reads too slowly (or quickly!), Speaks in fits and starts and is not at all that. In general, a complete failure. And how to fix this is not at all clear.
So we asked the speech therapist Daria Belousova to share with us a simple and understandable algorithm for preparing a retelling with a child so that later he could do it on his own.
In elementary school, children are often given homework to retell a text. Do not underestimate this skill, as later it will at least come in handy for passing state exams in grades 9 and 11. Retelling helps to comprehend the text, highlight the main and secondary, and much more.
How to prepare a retelling?
You can read the material several times and reproduce it yourself: first in parts, and then as a whole.
This is a common way to prepare a retelling, but it is only effective when the text is small.
If you have a lot to remember, use other techniques.
Teach children to group material into semantic chunks, separate subtopics within a general topic. For elementary school students, this is a challenging process because the children consider every sentence to be important.
So do it together first: take apart a few small, well-structured texts. Let the child see that, although each part is about different things, together they describe one phenomenon or develop one thought.
The semantic grouping carried out by the child may not coincide with the grouping of the adult, but the main thing is not this, but the fact that it contains logic.
What to do next? We work according to the following plan.
1. Select a title
If the child can already independently group the material, then you need to teach him to name the highlighted parts so that the title is generalized in relation to the entire highlighted section.
A good practice is to use a hint if the child is stumped. It is important not to give the student one single title, but several to choose from.
2. Make an outline of the story
Writing a story plan is a skill that a student needs to make it easier to reproduce the text later. In fact, a story plan is a collection of section titles that are found when semantic grouping of the text.
In middle grades, it is more efficient to use keywords.
Key words are not necessarily generalizing words to a passage of text. These are any words that are fixed in memory and become semantic reference points, remembering which the child can easily reproduce the entire content of the passage. These can be nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech.
Let the child try to write down different words, and gradually he will understand which of them help him remember the text best.
After the student learns to easily highlight the semantic pieces of the text and give them names, we proceed to the next stage.
3. Learn to fix the titles of the text in your mind
Explain to your child that when he wants to learn some material, he does not have to write the title on paper, you can do it silently.
Let the child try.
When you have worked this skill, change your tactics a little.
Say that it is no longer necessary to come up with an extended title, but you can use a suitable word from the text.
Thus, you will gradually develop the ability to translate the initially unfolded activity into the internal plan, and the child will learn to effectively memorize and retell even voluminous stories.
Photo: VOSTOCK
